


Independence Day

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Fourth of July, Gen, Holidays, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 03:34:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7343131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tumblr prompt: Mick's first 4th of July post-Legends literally brings Len back from the dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Independence Day

Mick wasn't really in the mood for cooking, and he was sure people could tell. The usually boisterous mood at the - their - annual July Fourth cookout was subdued. In defiance of the harsh sunlight and high temperatures, Mick is wearing black. Black pants, black shirt, black shoes.

It seemed appropriate. 

Hell, Mick hadn't even wanted to celebrate July 4th, not this close to losing Len, but Lisa had insisted. He didn't really have the energy to resist her, even if every time he looked at her he saw Len's face, eyes glistening with unshed tears as Mick threatened to kill her. Maybe because of that. But she had insisted, saying it was Len's tradition and he wouldn't want it to die just because he had. 

Mick had crumpled like a cheap suit, just to make her stop bringing up the fact that Len’s gone.

So Mick went about the motions, pulling the grills out of storage and setting them up on the roof of Saints, sending word around the neighborhood on time and place, buying meat from his usual butchers, who took one look at his face and went without their usual haggling over cuts and price. One of them even gave him extra some lamb chops for free, which is definitely a first. Mick must’ve really looked pathetic. 

Masochistically, Mick decides he's going to make all of Len's favorites. Len always liked it when Mick cooked for him, and he'd eaten meat in particular like the starving child he was inside, but Mick had eventually managed to wrest some preferences out of him and today he made them all. Piles upon piles of warm, fresh frybread and meatballs, cooked and then grilled for an extra sear. Short ribs braised in wine and rosemary until the bone is the only thing holding them together. Lamb chops, marinated in herbs and olive oil and encrusted with honey-roasted pecans. Tenderloin done steak style, long bloody pieces that glistened in the light and beaded up with moisture at the touch of a fork. Fish on the grill, skins rubbed in sea salt and brown sugar and a touch of syrupy molasses sinking into the flesh until it melted in the mouth. Hearty ribeyes wrapped in thick slabs of bacon, served in a sauce of their own juicy drippings. 

Lisa keeps tearing up every time she wanders too close to the grills, the smell making her think of Len; this perversely pleases Mick because at least she’s not hanging around him all the time like she thinks he’s going to do something unwise the way she has been these last few weeks, after the Waverider’s new trip went south and Mick had to come home instead, to brood on his thoughts and to see Len in every corner and block of Central City. 

Not even getting out to try his new fireworks can lift Mick’s mood.

Though they _are_ pretty awesome fireworks. He’d found them on the Waverider and asked Gideon what they did; she showed him a demo video where it seemed like they actually darkened the sky around them before bursting into flames and shooting out sparks. Since that effect couldn’t be seen as well too late in the evening, when they had their usual fireworks bonanza, Mick was planning on kicking off the festivities with them.

Lisa lets people in, most of the early arrivals regulars from years past carrying a wide variety of alcohol in their arms as a nod back to the days when they’d first started the July 4th party and could only afford either liquor or proper meat but not both and Mick wasn’t willing to compromise on the meat. Once the roof is mostly full, people helping themselves to the appetizers and finger food while waiting for the rest to come off the grill, some late stragglers winding their way in, Mick gives Lisa the nod and she sets them off.

They’re fucking gorgeous: the sky darkens ominously (people ooh appreciatively) and then the heads go off in bursts of beautiful light, fire red and flame white, Oculus blue and time-river green. 

Mick thinks Len would have liked it, then turns back to his business of making food because he can’t think of Len right now in front of all these people.

He’s served up large portions of everything, with Lisa overseeing a number of newly recruited minions to pull the pre-made stuff from the kitchen downstairs, and is on the second round when there’s a little cough.

Mick looks up and meets a very familiar pair of blue-hazel eyes.

He freezes stiffer than he would be if he’d been shot by Len’s cold gun.

It _can’t_ be.

And yet it is.

Len’s standing there, Captain Cold himself in the flesh; circles under his eyes so dark that they look like jagged lines carved into his face with a knife, hair a little more salt than pepper than it used to be, and a few too many pounds short of where he should be. He’s wearing tan pants and a dark green coat, of all incongruous things; it hangs off his frame like it’s too large, made for broader shoulder than Len’s, and has an almost liquid shine like it’s made of some textile that hasn’t yet been invented, but it doesn’t conceal any of the changes beneath: the crook of his left little finger that tells of a recent break, evident even under the seasonally inappropriate gloves he’s wearing; the arched shoulders and uneven weight foretelling some limp, though Mick can’t tell what’s the cause; thin white lines that run up along the side of his face and over one ear, like a lighting blast hit him straight on horizontally. The strange scrawling marks edging their way up his collarbone, just peeking through his plain grey shirt, scraped into his skin like claw marks and shining a dull blue glow that’s evident even in the slowly fading daylight. Mick can’t tell if they’re tattoos or some brand new form of injury. 

But it’s Len, standing there, looking at him with an unreadable expression and holding out an empty plate.

They stare at each other in silence for endless moments.

Len breaks first, because Len always breaks a silence first, the inveterate chatterbox desperate to fill the space around him until his own thoughts can drown in the noise. 

He clears his throat. Says, “I don’t know what to ask for. You made all the best things.”

“You can have all of ‘em,” Mick replies automatically. “I made enough. How…?”

Len’s lips twitch into a sneer for half a second before flattening out by pure force. “Timeline error,” he says grimly. “There were Time Masters out there – ones that didn’t get caught in the blast – and some of them, enough of them, decided they wanted to try to fix the timeline so we didn’t win.”

Mick frowns. “The Vanishing Point doesn’t work like that,” he points out. “It’s supposed to be outside of time.”

“Nothing’s purely outside of time,” Len replies, voice quiet. “Otherwise you’d be frozen in place, like in those horror movies about black holes right before you get ripped apart atom by atom forever. But the Vanishing Point's outside of time _enough_ that they couldn’t stop me from destroying the Oculus. It was too significant. A fixed point. But they kept trying, and one of them ended up pulling me out of there. Oculus still blew, but for the first time in –” His face spasms as if in terrible pain. “- in _hundreds_ of repetitions, I wasn’t there. Didn’t have to be there. The destruction became self-perpetuating because of their constant interference. Like what happened with Rip’s family.”

Mick nods, long and slow, eying Len and measuring the time that’s passed in pounds and scars and endless sleep deprivation. “What happened then?”

Len’s smile is ghoulish. “Well, I was in the custody of the Time Masters that, ah, ‘rescued’ me for a while.”

Mick, who’d been there in Time Master custody and experienced their so-called hospitality, can feel his hands curling around the grilling tongs until his knuckles scream in agony. And Len was there alone, knowing there was no hope of rescue because everyone thought he was dead, and all that time Mick was back here, just sitting around and pulling crappy little heists and moping…

“You escaped,” he says. A statement, not a question. Len wasn’t him. Len didn’t make deals. Len didn’t break.

“I escaped,” Len confirms, inclining his head. “Took a bit of doing, but I worked out how eventually. Unfortunately, that left me in the time stream with no idea on which way to go, and an AI I had to keep off because otherwise it’d have spaced me in a heartbeat.”

“Manual flying?” Mick asks, wincing. He’d been trained to travel the time stream as Kronos, but manual flying as a bitch no way you looked at it. 

“Luckily I knew a bit from our approach to the Vanishing Point that one time,” Len says. “Sara’d shared some of her insights while we were waiting for them to finish searching the ship. So I got the damn rust bucket moving, but I couldn’t direct her properly, couldn’t find my way back here – and they were chasing me, night and day and yesterday. Moved around where I could, kept low. Blew more than few of them to smithereens. Then I came here.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know how to find this time.”

“I didn’t. But then I saw your flares –”

“My what?”

This time, Len does smile, if tiredly. “They make the sky go dark?”

“The _fireworks_?”

“That’s how I knew it was you,” Len says. “No one else would use up ten ion-grade darkwork time-twister missiles, which probably cost more apiece than the Waverider’s worth on a good day, in one go - _on the fourth of July_.”

Mick has to admit that while he didn’t know how valuable they were, it probably wouldn’t have changed his actions one jot. 

“And that’s how you found us?”

Len nods. “That’s how I found you.” His smile wavers. “If I’m still welcome, of course. Heard you got a new partner after I was gone.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Mick says savagely, dropping the tongs and clambering out of his nest of grills to grab Len and pull him close. “Haircut’s cute and all, but he ain’t you.”

Len startles at Mick’s touch like he hasn’t in years, twitchy as a beaten dog, but Mick knows better than to let Len pull away and try to cover himself with that icy mask of his. He holds on tight and after a few moments Len lets out a long sigh, his head drooping down to rest on Mick’s shoulder, his hands flittering around a few seconds more before settling on Mick’s hips. He’s tired, Mick can tell; tired and hurt and running on empty. The way the time stream worked, he could’ve been running for years, trying to come back to them and constantly coming up empty, all alone with his thoughts and his loneliness and his pain.

“I got you, Lenny,” Mick says, tightening his grip. He’s not letting go; no one, not even Len, could make him let go now. His hands are shaking, he distantly notes, but it’s not important. Nothing’s important, nothing but the fact that it’s Len, it’s _his Lenny_ , back home at last where he belonged when Mick would’ve sworn he was gone for good. Len's got more lives than a cat, and Mick is so pathetically grateful for it that he almost wishes he was religious so he'd have someone to thank. “You’re home now. You can rest; if any of those time fuckers come here hunting you, they’ll get it up the ass with both barrels.”

“Mine and yours?”

“Mine and Lisa’s,” Mick says firmly. “ _You’ll_ be in bed asleep, with your – uncharged – cold gun beside you like some demented teddy bear; don’t lie, I’ve seen you do it.”

“I’m not that tired,” Len lies like a rug. A not very convincing rug who looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade. “Besides, you made _frybread_. I’m not going to sleep till I’ve had enough pieces to make the Flash jealous.”

Mick laughs till he’s very nearly crying for the first time in forever, and that’s when Lisa comes across them, shrieking Len’s name with a voice that could easily be classified as a new meta threat, and she doesn’t even bother to keep back the tears.

Some kid sets off a proper firework in the sky, right above their heads in the light of the setting sun, all three of them clutching each other so hard you couldn’t pry them off with a crowbar, and some piece of Mick that he would’ve sworn was gone forever clicks right back into place.

Len's home, and now, at last, so is Mick.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, Mick's wearing Len's traditional all-black get-up and Len's wearing Mick's favorite color combination, grey and tan and green. And yes, the jacket is too large because it's Mick's size.


End file.
